ateful, and exquisite imagination are,
once more, not known. Years ago it was laid down finally by the most
competent of possible authorities (the late Sir John Rhys) that "the
love of Lancelot and Guinevere is unknown to Welsh literature."
Originals for the "greatest knight" have been sought by guesswork, by
idle play on words and names, if not also by positive forgery, in that
Breton literature which does not exist. There do exist versions of the
story in which Lancelot plays no very prominent part, and there is even
one singular version--certainly late and probably devised by a proper
moral man afraid of scandal--which makes Lancelot outlive the Queen,
quite comfortably continuing his adventurous career (this is perhaps the
"furthest" of the Unthinkable in literature), and (not, it may be owned,
quite inconsistently) hints that the connection was merely Platonic
throughout. These things are explicable, but better negligible. For my
own part I have always thought that the loves of Tristram and Iseult
(which, as has been said, were originally un-Arthurian) suggested the
main idea to the author of it, being taken together with Guinevere's
falseness with Mordred in the old quasi-chronicle, and perhaps the story
of the abduction by Melvas (Meleagraunce), which seems to be possibly a
genuine Welsh legend. There are in the Tristram-Iseult-Mark trio quite
sufficient suggestions of Lancelot-Guinevere-Arthur; while the far
higher plane on which the novice-novelist sets his lovers, and even the
very interesting subsequent exaltation of Tristram and Iseult themselves
to familiarity and to some extent equality with the other pair, has
nothing critically difficult in it.

But this idea, great and promising as it was, required further
fertilisation, and got it from another. The Graal story is (once more,
according to authority of the greatest competence, and likely if
anything to be biassed the other way) pretty certainly not Welsh in
origin, and there is no reason to think that it originally had anything
to do with Arthur. Even after it obeyed the strange "suck" of legends
towards this centre whirlpool, or Loadstone Rock, of romance, it yielded
nothing intimately connected with the Arthurian Legend itself at first,
and such connection as succeeded seems pretty certainly[31] to be that
of which Percevale is the hero, and an outlier, not an integral part.
But either the same genius (as one would fain hope) as that which
devised the